After the litany of awkward antiwar polemics foisted on filmgoers
in the fall (In the Valley of Elah, The Kingdom, Rendition, Lions for Lambs,
Redacted), it seemed fair to ask what
it would take for Hollywood to make a good movie about war and politics. The
answer provided by writer Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols is simplicity
itself: Leave out most of the war and all the politics.
Charlie Wilson’s War
won’t have any effect on the course of world affairs--and it’s sensible enough
to recognize this. The backdrop of the movie may be the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of fanatical Islam, but the
foreground is filled with attractive stars trading sharp, Sorkinized dialogue.
“Why is Congress saying one thing and doing nothing?” a character asks Texas
Representative Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) in the early going. “Well,” he begins,
before pausing thoughtfully, “tradition, mostly.”
Based on George Crile’s stranger-than-fiction account of the
CIA’s largest-ever covert operation, the film follows the 1980s evolution of
Wilson from amiable, boozy philanderer to amiable, boozy philanderer with a
purpose--specifically, providing support to the Afghan mujahideen trying to expel the Soviet invasion. He was inspired in
this cause in part by Houston
socialite-cum-freedom-fighter Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) and aided by CIA
case officer Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Pre-Wilson, the annual covert
ops budget for Afghanistan
was $5 million; by the time he was done, it was $1 billion.
The rest, as they say, is history. The Soviet
Union was expelled and suffered a blow from which it never really
recovered. But, when America
went back to ignoring Afghanistan,
our erstwhile rebel allies underwent the small but crucial etymological shift
from mujahideen to jihadi. As the (real) Wilson summarizes in an onscreen quote at the
conclusion of the film: “Those things happened. They were glorious and they
changed the world. And then we fucked up the endgame.”
It’s a moral that cuts neatly across partisan
lines--half-hawkish, half-dovish, and uncontroversial enough that Nichols and
Sorkin don’t have to waste time scoring political points. The script is
sprinkled with enough contemporaneous references (to Tip O’Neill, Boris
Spassky, Rudy Giuliani, etc.) to feel smart, but never so many that it looks
like it’s trying to be Serious. And it crams quite a bit into its slim,
97-minute running time, chronicling not merely Wilson’s geopolitical crusade, but also his
personal mission to dally with a Clintonesque tally of young beauties. (The
film rather overdoes it on this score.)
Hanks is an odd choice to play “Good Time Charlie,” the
bluff, womanizing Texan (someone like Thomas Hayden Church seems a closer fit),
but he gives the role a likable spin nonetheless, conjuring a congressman a bit
more languid and ironic than one imagines the original to have been. Julia
Roberts is a considerably greater stretch as the fiftysomething man-eater
Herring, her platinum helmet of hair appearing borrowed from someone else or
perhaps even spliced in from another movie. It’s also interesting to note that
even as Roberts is clearly (and shrewdly) starting to look for ways to
transition into older roles, she’s not yet ready to put all her eggs in that
basket: One scene in the movie has her answering the telephone while stepping,
bikini-clad, from the pool, revealing a bod that is fifty going on twenty-two.
But despite the dissonance, Roberts turns in an adequate performance, rescuing
an act of miscasting that could easily have proven disastrous.
From the moment he appears onscreen, however, this is Philip
Seymour Hoffman’s movie. His rumpled, cranky spy is hilarious--George Smiley by
way of Jack Black--but with an edge of quiet ferocity that makes every scene
he’s in play a little sharper. He’s the funniest character in the film, but also
seems the most real, a man whose terse wit and don’t-give-a-shit demeanor might
easily have been forged by a career of unseemly, spookish deeds. There are
times when even his costars seem a touch afraid of him, as if he’s brought an
unanticipated, potentially dangerous element into the otherwise breezy
proceedings.
A touch more breeze might
have benefited Hoffman’s other end-of-the-year opening, the smart but somewhat
claustrophobic The Savages, in which
he is paired with Laura Linney. If Hoffman's performances frequently contain an
undercurrent of fury, Linney’s are rarely more than a few steps removed from
panic, and these tendencies interact with contrapuntal precision in Tamara
Jenkins’s dark comedy about two siblings forced to care for their estranged
father (Philip Bosco) as he slips into senile dementia.
Wendy Savage (Linney) is a would-be playwright who temps to
pay the bills and sleeps with a married neighbor while he’s supposedly out
walking the labrador. (The most memorable shot in the film is of her reaching
out to touch the dog’s paw in the midst of one such coital encounter, a pitiable
grasp at the connection sex isn’t providing.) Her brother, Jon (Hoffman),
teaches university classes in “the theatre of social unrest” while struggling to
complete his book on Brecht and pining for an ex-girlfriend who has flown back
to Poland.
The operative word for both siblings, in other words, is “drama.”
And this is before
they get the call from a retirement community in Sun City, Arizona,
telling them that their father, whom neither has spoken to in years, has taken
to writing obscenities on the bathroom wall in his own shit. They fly out
together to retrieve him and set him up in a rest home near Jon’s house in Buffalo. (Because who
wouldn’t want to spend his dying winters in Buffalo?) There, the siblings begin grinding
their insecurities against one another--his, passive-aggressive; hers, manic-defensive--to
alternating comic and tragic effect.
It’s a dynamic that persists, with somewhat diminishing returns,
for most of the film. Linney and Hoffman are both terrific, and Jenkins’s
script is pointed and perceptive, but the film’s arc is a little flat. Jenkins
should be congratulated for not indulging in glib uplift, but she seems, for a
while at least, uncertain of what to offer in its place. (It perhaps doesn’t
help that this closed family dramedy stretches to a shade under two hours.) The Savages offers a great opportunity
to watch two gifted performers mine the rough terrain between humor and
despair. But if you’re like me, by the end you may feel ready for a movie that
can’t even get itself too worked up about the collapse of communism and birth
of global jihad.
CHRISTOPHER ORR is a senior editor at The New Republic.